Baby, if you've ever wondered...

[c9]

I'm teaching in Ottawa this week at Polar Bear's Ottawa office. Not a bad gig, beyond the being alone all week, and leapfish being alone all week. That's no good.

Flew here on QuikAir (www.quikair.ca).The plane was roughly the size of a typical airport shuttle. Note: not intercity shuttle plane, I mean the minibus you might take to get TO the airport. 19 seats. almost no aisle, no services at all. But kinda fun. I was seated on the wing, and the plane was small enough that I could feel all the lateral and vertical movements. Fairly smooth, fairly noisy. No tray table for my laptop.

Checked into hotel, got high-speed internet, went out to supper with friends, talked to Vinny, hung out and chatted with Jason (who will soon join LJ if we all bug him enough), talked to Vinny one more time, headed for bed.

This morning I realized that I still had setup to do on my laptop, so I frantically installed Red Hat 9 while eating a croissant. It's not easy to frantically install Linux, let me tell you. But the day went fine, and now it's done and I'm just sitting here in te empty classroom, letting Red Hat 7 install itself for my students. Dang, anaconda is slow.

Tonight, I think I shall go to Paddy Boland's, the bar my little brother (the one who's three inches taller than me :-) works at, for a visit. Then probably hang out in the hotel and veg.

Comments

[simplisticton.livejournal.com]

SUSE puts config files in weird places and YAST stubbornly generates config files that are impermeable to mere humans when if you want to edit something by hand. FC lets you stay closer to the metal, and the ability to add in non-distro provided channels for extended software support (see Fedora.US, FreshRPMS.net, and ATRpms.net for some examples). FC is harder to learn, but worth it for power-users. Also, it has a beautiful GNOME desktop if you're not a fan of KDE.

[c9.livejournal.com]

I find it hard to figure out what's default in Linux distros and what's modified these days. For example, so much in FC is different from the other distros (including but not limited to Bluecurve) that I don't know if it's as good a teaching platform as some others. But I do know it better, to I suppose that makes it pretty good.

[simplisticton.livejournal.com]

As long as you're teaching skill as opposed to procedure, it shouldn't matter what distro you use. Teaching someone to recognize a problem caused by a bad /etc/hosts file is more important than teaching them to use distro-specific-config-tool-for-networking or whatever.

[c9.livejournal.com]

Too often I'm asked "how do I set X to understand my video card?" That's a little too customized in most distros. But yeah, everything that's networking-related is a little easier.